SEO Blog

As with any new system where the results are ordered by popularity, it doesn’t take long before people start to find a way to manipulate the rankings. With Digg people will offer to ‘digg’ your content and with StumbleUpon people can ‘stumble’ your content, and in both occasions there are services that let you pay people to promote your content on these platforms in this way. Now it seems Google+ is next.

In the case of Digg and StumbleUpon, the more people who promote your content the more chance it has of being seen by other users, or appearing at the top of various lists of information. The higher you appear, the more people will read your content and this helps to spread awareness of a brand online. So it’s easy to see how people could be tempted to pay strangers to manipulate these platforms.

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If you have come up against one of the big, established brands online, you will probably be well aware of how difficult it is to dislodge them from the top of the search engines. Google have made it very clear that brands are given certain advantages, both for their name and associated products. The big brand update a couple of years back saw huge corporations soar to the top of a lot of listings, a position many still hold today.

One of the major advantages any brand has comes with the domain name. If they have decided to simply use the company name and it is unique (or at least reasonably unique), then top spot is almost assured. Of course, large brands can also take advantage of their size and clout, choosing to adopt an alternative URL and dominate that market as well.
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Most businesses would be more than happy to emulate the success of a rival company. That’s all well and good, it gives you a clear objective and targets to achieve. However, it does represent certain problems.

There are some people who take this to the absolute nth degree though. Not only do they want to get a piece of the action, but they want to take the quick ticket to glory. This leads to emulation, rather than innovation. In some instances, whole websites are copied, often inclusive of content, design and even the name. As if you needed reminding, this is not good practice.
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There are a fair few metrics for measuring the impact of an SEO campaign. However, not all webmasters use the same ones, whilst agencies and consultants choose to only report on others. So which are the most important for you?

The first, and arguably most difficult to measure is the return on investment (ROI). If you’ve been throwing money at an expensive SEO campaign you want to see some form of financial return. Unfortunately, without setting up effective tracking through an analytics package (often requiring the usage of a Thank You page), ROI can only really be determined by manually calculating income and determining which traffic can from which source.
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For any retailer that either isn’t online or isn’t taking advantage of SEO, the latest figures from the Online Retail Monitor should encourage you to do exactly that. Whilst the outlook on the high street is looking grim, it’s online and in particular through search engines where activity is booming.

The research conducted by the Retail Monitor group is a joint venture between the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and the search giant Google. The figures have revealed that online retail search has increased by 27% in the second quarter of 2011 compared to the same time last year.
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SEO needs to be taken as a medium to long term strategy. Just like marketing and just like PR. You won’t receive overnight success, and if anyone’s offering you this, you should take their claims with a pinch of salt, because the reality is that SEO needs to be built up over a long period to be effective.

Naturally, the results will vary depending on the client, the industry, your consultant or agency as well as the campaign itself. For example, different agencies and consultants will use different tactics, and it’s usually those who are offering quick results who are dabbling in the murky world of black hat tactics.
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Whenever there’s a task that you have to do out of necessity, rather than any real enjoyment, it’s fair to say that it can be quite laborious and you won’t necessarily put your heart into it. Where SEO is involved, this could relate to any number of duties: writing content, link building, site coding etc.

Of course you can’t just do one thing to the detriment of all others, but there’s certainly no harm in focussing primarily on the things that you enjoy rather than those you don’t. For instance, let’s say you like writing and would be more than happy to see all else fall by the wayside. There’s so much that you can achieve just through producing good quality, unique content, that it could easily become the foundation of your entire SEO efforts.
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Only you know what your online marketing budget is. Equally, as a business owner, it is your decision on how best to distribute funds. Whilst SEO might be essential for your website, how you go about performing this work is an entirely personal decision.

If you run a small operation with an equally diminutive website, it might be possible to do the work yourself. There’s certainly information available on how to market a site and SEO best practices are hardly a well-kept secret. However, it is labour intensive, requires a fair amount of knowledge and can be hugely frustrating. This is why so many choose to seek expert help.
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Google has been sending out widespread warnings to webmasters indulging in a little underhanded link building since December last year. However, it appears that some people still aren’t getting the message, as was discovered by WebProNews.

Essentially, if Google sends you an email suggesting that it has detected unnatural links on your site, the game is up. You’ll be handed a suspension and asked to resubmit your site when the offending links are removed. The issue for some webmasters is that there is no direct indication which links are ‘illegal’ and need to be removed. This has led to confusion amongst many.

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There are some SEO techniques that work, at least occasionally, but aren’t necessarily advisable. One of these is leaving spammy comments in forums and blog posts.

Now there is nothing wrong whatsoever with leaving a comment to add your opinion to an article, in fact that’s extremely positive SEO and will be appreciated by the author. You can even use a keyword-optimised ‘name’ to get a stronger link, as long as your basic message is strong enough. But, the most important thing to remember is that you should be looking to provide something worthwhile in exchange for the link.
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